Google says being told to pay is like, "taxing a taxi driver for taking tourists to eat."

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Brazil's National Association of Newspapers decided to deny Google News the ability to re-post headlines and the first few sentences of articles from newspapers around the country. The 154 member newspapers make up 90 percent of Brazil's newspaper circulation. The association explained the decision by saying Google News was siphoning traffic away from their websites and refusing to pay for the free content.

According the BBC, the Brazilian newspaper association (known in the country as the AJN) worked with Google News since 2010, letting Google post the headline and the first sentence of Brazilian news stories. But the association decided to stop cooperating because it claims "the experiment has failed."

"Staying with Google News was not helping us grow our digital audiences, on the contrary," said the association's president, Carlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto, in an interview with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. "By providing the first few lines of our stories to Internet users, the service reduces the chances that they will look at the entire story in our websites."

That's not to say Google News reduced traffic for the news sites overall, but the AJN sees minimal benefit from a listing in Google News. "The loss of online traffic caused by the newspapers’ departure from Google News hasn’t made AJN change its position since," The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas reported. Lindenberg told Knight, "Google News’ presence in the Brazilian market is small. We believe (the loss of traffic) is an acceptable price to protect our content and brands."

Google, naturally, disagrees and says it helped Brazilian news sites reach a larger audience than they normally would have. The AJN says it would only consider returning to Google News if Google pays each news outlet to reuse their headlines. Google likened such a setup to, "taxing a taxi driver for taking tourists to eat at a particular restaurant."

Brazil is not the first country to demand payment from Google for printing headlines from the press (in fact, the AJN has been recommending its members opt out of Google News for several months now). France is currently at odds with Google over the very same issue. While Google News currently won't show anything from outlets like O Globo and O Estado de Sao Paulo, users can still access the websites through a regular Google search.

I can see where they're coming from. I use Google news as my first news site, and I will definitely not click on the link to go to the news site if the story doesn't interest me. It in unfortunate though, if more and more news organizations follow this approach, their action would begin to render GN obsolete, which I think would be a loss. But it is their call, their pro/con decision.

I am curious though if Google makes money on GN, perhaps via some indirect means. I doubt it though (I don't think I ever seen ads in GN feed).

"Staying with Google News was not helping us grow our digital audiences, on the contrary," said the association's president, Carlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto, in an interview with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. "By providing the first few lines of our stories to Internet users, the service reduces the chances that they will look at the entire story in our websites."

So what you're saying is that people didn't come to your website anymore to look at content that they didn't want to look at in the first place?

So, the solution to this isn't to expand coverage on what people want. No, the solution is to pull the content from Google.

Well, Brazilian newspapers, enjoy your oncoming irrelevance. It seems that shortly your readers will be getting their news from outside the Brazilian newspapers - probably from websites of new channels, or from foreign sites like the BBC.

Now all that's needed is for one savvy Brazilian newspaper to break ranks with the rest and allow Google to link to their articles. In one fell swoop, this newspaper then become the most popular online news site in Brazil.

So they're saying that the posting of headlines and first sentences potentially lessens the click through rate to their site? I can understand the hesitation to keep with this strategy but you dont cut your nose off to spite your face. Do they have a back up strategy?

Didn't Reuters and the AP go through this same bullshit not too long ago? If someone is taking your news and reporting it as their own you deserve to get paid but when someone is taking your headlines and sending the traffic for the story directly to your site the onus falls on you to figure out how to make money from that additional set of eyeballs. I swear it's like these people don't get how the Internet works ("It's a series of tubes...").

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how Google News impacts these Brazilian sites either way. 99.999% of readers interested in Brazilian news are Brazilians who have already bookmarked their favorite sites. These sites are never going to benefit from international exposure anyway.

In other words, it's not as if you aren't going to read O Globo because Google News does or doesn't index it. And if you do read an O Globo article, chances are you already read O Globo already.

I guess what I'm saying is that the number of people who would be interested in a given article but do or don't find it because of GN is infinitesimal.

What is actually killing these papers is syndicated content like Reuters or the AP. You get the same stories everywhere, and it becomes incredibly difficult to separate non-commoditized content.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how Google News impacts these Brazilian sites either way. 99.999% of readers interested in Brazilian news are Brazilians who have already bookmarked their favorite sites. These sites are never going to benefit from international exposure anyway.

Many (most?) news companies are much older than Google, they existed perfectly and were profitable before Google news turned up.

So clearly, the news companies do not need Google to exist.

But if a significant portion of customers start accessing a website via Google, then that website will be at Google's mercy. Google can send them bankrupt at any time, and might even do so by accident.

I can see where they're coming from. I use Google news as my first news site, and I will definitely not click on the link to go to the news site if the story doesn't interest me. It in unfortunate though, if more and more news organizations follow this approach, their action would begin to render GN obsolete, which I think would be a loss. But it is their call, their pro/con decision.

If their news are irrelevant and uninteresting that people would rather visit some other site, the newspapers only have themselves to blame for that. After all, Google is only indexing and linking to them and whatever gets indexed is up to the news sites themselves.

I have to question the logic behind this kind of decision, though. I just can't figure how someone who complains about diminishing traffic believes that disappearing altogether from a search result is somehow going to fix that.

Thats akin of wanting to be celibate by blowing your dick off with a shotgun.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how Google News impacts these Brazilian sites either way. 99.999% of readers interested in Brazilian news are Brazilians who have already bookmarked their favorite sites. These sites are never going to benefit from international exposure anyway.

In other words, it's not as if you aren't going to read O Globo because Google News does or doesn't index it. And if you do read an O Globo article, chances are you already read O Globo already.

I guess what I'm saying is that the number of people who would be interested in a given article but do or don't find it because of GN is infinitesimal.

What is actually killing these papers is syndicated content like Reuters or the AP. You get the same stories everywhere, and it becomes incredibly difficult to separate non-commoditized content.

The implied complaint is that readers skim the abstracts on GN and never click through to any of the news sites. Had the reader gone to the paper's website to scan the headlines, at least he/she would have been served the homepage ads.

This behavior would be consistent with a drop in traffic after signing up with GN. The real reason seems to be either (1) the miniscule extra traffic is not worth the effort or (2) they are afraid of some potential bad outcome that hasn't actually materialized.

"Staying with Google News was not helping us grow our digital audiences, on the contrary," said the association's president, Carlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto, in an interview with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. "By providing the first few lines of our stories to Internet users, the service reduces the chances that they will look at the entire story in our websites."

So what you're saying is that people didn't come to your website anymore to look at content that they didn't want to look at in the first place?

So, the solution to this isn't to expand coverage on what people want. No, the solution is to pull the content from Google.

Well, Brazilian newspapers, enjoy your oncoming irrelevance. It seems that shortly your readers will be getting their news from outside the Brazilian newspapers - probably from websites of new channels, or from foreign sites like the BBC.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how Google News impacts these Brazilian sites either way. 99.999% of readers interested in Brazilian news are Brazilians who have already bookmarked their favorite sites. These sites are never going to benefit from international exposure anyway.

Kind of.

People are moving to searching for EVERYTHING. You might even do it without realising.

For example, here in the UK we have a few topical humour shows. Some take the form of quizzes, some are just panel based. ("Have I Got News For You" and "Mock The Week" are two good examples.)

When some celebrity I've never heard of appears on one, the first thing I do is search for them - so that I can get context for the jokes. And high up in the results is usually a small grouping of headlines, along with a link to do a dedicated Google News search for more.

As an example, go search for a celebrity - you might get their official site first, but the second or third block in the results will be "News for <vacuous waste of space's name goes here>".

This kind of searching only increases when you're doing it from mobile devices - phones and tablets. It's an incredibly convenient way to get the latest news on a specific subject, or to find the wikipedia page/website/whatever.And these newspapers have just excluded themselves from the results. Do you think Google will just stop returning any news for searches in Brazil? Or do you think they'll just return some other websites?

Quote:

What is actually killing these papers is syndicated content like Reuters or the AP. You get the same stories everywhere, and it becomes incredibly difficult to separate non-commoditized content.

Why do we come to Ars Technica for news? Is it because they're first to report on things? No, they're not.We come here because their in-depth reviews, editorial comment and reporting has shown them to be reliable, trustworthy, and to go a little deeper than simple reposting the press release.

Newspapers need to look at getting the same sort of reputation in order to survive. Sadly, it's very difficult and very expensive to do so - which means they just do stupid things like this instead.

This is not about GN sending/not sending people to read full articles - web sites don't make money only when readers read the entire article.

Most readers only read the headlines and perhaps the first few sentences of an article. The paper/web site makes money from serving ads while the reader does that kind of skimming. By taking this skimming + ad-serving opportunity away from a newspaper's web site, Google takes away that revenue opportunity.

And if Google is pulling in revenue from reprinting headlines and the first few sentences they should pay up. The question is not so much of how much content their using (the fair use argument) but the fact that they are making money from content that they haven't licensed/paid for.

I can see where they're coming from. I use Google news as my first news site, and I will definitely not click on the link to go to the news site if the story doesn't interest me.

Seems the problem is the news organization, rather than Google.

If people aren't clicking to your site after the first couple of sentences, they don't care about what you're writing. When they can't see it on Google, they still won't care.

Except news is news, and hopefully not an editorial. If a person doesn't care about the event being reported, no amount of good writing style would help. If I were to skim articles on GN and see no stories that interest me, I would never go to a news website. They are hoping, as others have mentioned, for that skimming to be done on their own site, to expose readers to ads.

What the news papers are hoping is that people will browse the headlines from their own home page (where ads are presented) instead of browsing the headlines from Google News. Probably.

Commenting about my own post.

On the other hand, Google News does a pretty good job of compiling news based on a topic from all over the place. For example I normally read Atlanta based news. If the Washington Post had a good story in or around Atlanta I might click through to read their post. But if they remove themselves from Google News there's no way I'm going to the Washington Post website every day to check for Atlanta based news.

It would be interesting to know how many Brazilian news readers are click-throughs because the news matches a Google News topic rather than because they are following the paper itself. Knowing that would help decide which readers will drop completely and which MIGHT start going straight to the paper's home page.

GN could do a lot more for their newspaper partners by making it a little bit simpler to select preferred news sources on their page than it currently is. Full menus, descriptions of news services and similar news sources would be a lot better than their editors choice panels, or their popular rag sliders. If a modern business is asking for money, rather than an optimization of the users experience and customizability, I'd imagine that the company is being ran in to the ground anyway.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how Google News impacts these Brazilian sites either way. 99.999% of readers interested in Brazilian news are Brazilians who have already bookmarked their favorite sites. These sites are never going to benefit from international exposure anyway.

Kind of.

People are moving to searching for EVERYTHING. You might even do it without realising.

For example, here in the UK we have a few topical humour shows. Some take the form of quizzes, some are just panel based. ("Have I Got News For You" and "Mock The Week" are two good examples.)

When some celebrity I've never heard of appears on one, the first thing I do is search for them - so that I can get context for the jokes. And high up in the results is usually a small grouping of headlines, along with a link to do a dedicated Google News search for more.

As an example, go search for a celebrity - you might get their official site first, but the second or third block in the results will be "News for <vacuous waste of space's name goes here>".

This kind of searching only increases when you're doing it from mobile devices - phones and tablets. It's an incredibly convenient way to get the latest news on a specific subject, or to find the wikipedia page/website/whatever.And these newspapers have just excluded themselves from the results. Do you think Google will just stop returning any news for searches in Brazil? Or do you think they'll just return some other websites?

Quote:

What is actually killing these papers is syndicated content like Reuters or the AP. You get the same stories everywhere, and it becomes incredibly difficult to separate non-commoditized content.

Why do we come to Ars Technica for news? Is it because they're first to report on things? No, they're not.We come here because their in-depth reviews, editorial comment and reporting has shown them to be reliable, trustworthy, and to go a little deeper than simple reposting the press release.

Newspapers need to look at getting the same sort of reputation in order to survive. Sadly, it's very difficult and very expensive to do so - which means they just do stupid things like this instead.

I won't claim that my usage patterns are representative, but I never use GN and don't see the point of it. In the case of the celebrity, I will click Wikipedia or imdb almost always. I click on GN results about once per month.

If the content is syndicated I will get it on any number of sites I already read. If the story is big news I will get it on my favorite sites. If the story is likely to interest me chances are it will appear on my bookmarked sites.

In fact, I find GN to be a huge distraction. Why do I need to see 10000 hits for the same exact story?

This is typical of dying industry. they rarely think of the consequences of a present action. And what's to stop a news aggregating website outside of Brazilian jurisdiction to just copy the full articles like the Huffington post if Google news disappears? They would be in a even worst situation than with Google news.

News sites are becoming increasingly irrelevant because so many turn to more specialized sites and blogs for subjects like technology, science, entertainment, business and sports which use to be important features in newspapers.

Old style media should adapt now and be more innovative, but not by attacking the source of most of your click through.

What kind of fair use laws does Brazil (not) have? I'd thinking a link with a short excerpt would be ok just about anywhere that isn't entirely lacking fair use.

Brazil is a signatory to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (as is the United States.) The Berne Convention allows for nations to specify fair use under their national laws but as I (not a lawyer) understand it, the allowance for fair use is not a requirement. See http://zvon.org/law/r/bern.html#p~13 and http://zvon.org/law/r/bern.html#p~14

Brazil does have some form of fair use codified as part of its national laws but I am unaware of what specific restrictions and/or limitations on fair use are contained within the Brazilian fair use framework. It could be that for an individual in Brazil "a link with a short excerpt would be ok just about anywhere that isn't entirely lacking fair use" is exactly right but that for a corporate for-profit enterprise it is not. (Again, I know nothing of Brazilian law on the specific issue of fair use and only know what I do of US law and the Berne Convention based on a fight I had with a small town newspaper in Alabama several years back.)

(1) It shall be permissible to make quotations from a work which has already been lawfully made available to the public, provided that their making is compatible with fair practice, and their extent does not exceed that justified by the purpose, including quotations from newspaper articles and periodicals in the form of press summaries.

(2) It shall be a matter for legislation in the countries of the Union, and for special agreements existing or to be concluded between them, to permit the utilization, to the extent justified by the purpose, of literary or artistic works by way of illustration in publications, broadcasts or sound or visual recordings for teaching, provided such utilization is compatible with fair practice.

(3) Where use is made of works in accordance with the preceding paragraphs of this Article, mention shall be made of the source, and of the name of the author, if it appears thereon.

Screw them if they think they are better of without google let them do as they please. All google news does is make it so I only have to deal with one set of advertising garbage to get to content I find interesting without having to go to other sites and be advertised to more. Besides, if the article really interests me I'll go there and see the whole thing. If they are having issues bringing people to their site they might try writing better stories or write them in such a way to entice people to want to read the whole thing. Its getting increasingly harder these days to find a decent news site that isn't completely covered in useless advertising. Some sites actually have more advertising content than regular content, and some that are at the break even point are so poorly written its amazing any one will read their content any way.

Well, Brazilian newspapers, enjoy your oncoming irrelevance. It seems that shortly your readers will be getting their news from outside the Brazilian newspapers - probably from websites of new channels, or from foreign sites like the BBC.

Erm... So the newspapers of an entire country are rendered irrelevant simply because they're not on Google News?

And if Google is pulling in revenue from reprinting headlines and the first few sentences they should pay up. The question is not so much of how much content their using (the fair use argument) but the fact that they are making money from content that they haven't licensed/paid for.

"Brazil's National Association of Newspapers decided to deny Google News the ability to re-post headlines and the first few sentences of articles from newspapers around the country. The 154 member newspapers make up 90 percent of Brazil's newspaper circulation. The association explained the decision by saying Google News was siphoning traffic away from their websites and refusing to pay for the free content."

... I would now owe Ars money. Or is it different to you because Google's doing it?

I use Google News as what I call a "shite-filter", I look at the headline, I read a sentence or two, and if I'm not impressed by then I move onto another entry, without wasting my time on shite reporting... looks like a lot of people do the same...

Well, Brazilian newspapers, enjoy your oncoming irrelevance. It seems that shortly your readers will be getting their news from outside the Brazilian newspapers - probably from websites of new channels, or from foreign sites like the BBC.

Erm... So the newspapers of an entire country are rendered irrelevant simply because they're not on Google News?

Rendered irrelevant? Not to the people that already know about them and their web sites and use them, no. But for the users of Google (and presumably other search engines and news sites that index, link and excerpt them) who are not already aware, then...well...yeah, pretty much.

Well, Brazilian newspapers, enjoy your oncoming irrelevance. It seems that shortly your readers will be getting their news from outside the Brazilian newspapers - probably from websites of new channels, or from foreign sites like the BBC.

Erm... So the newspapers of an entire country are rendered irrelevant simply because they're not on Google News?

I'm envisioning a kind of future chase going on which will cumulate with all news being behind pay-walls. Then the real question, currently being avoided is, will people pay for their news...any news? As long as there's something to run to we'll never know.

And if Google is pulling in revenue from reprinting headlines and the first few sentences they should pay up. The question is not so much of how much content their using (the fair use argument) but the fact that they are making money from content that they haven't licensed/paid for.

As mentioned before, if there aren't any ads in the GN page, how are they exactly making a revenue out of the indexed news?